


The Shore of Dreams

by hannah_baker



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Murder, rated teen for blood, trust fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-27
Updated: 2014-02-27
Packaged: 2018-01-13 22:48:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1243435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hannah_baker/pseuds/hannah_baker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the shore of dreams, there is a nightmare. </p>
<p>Or, the one where Derek Hale finds himself helping Stiles Stilinski hide a body.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Shore of Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is post 3a, but fervently ignoring what's happening in 3b.

“Derek,” Stiles breathes over the phone, his voice thin over their connection. Derek can hear a rustle of leaves though, the pounding of Stiles’ uneven footsteps. “Derek I need your help now. _Now_.”

Derek rolls over in his bed. The time that has passed since Kate’s death helped loosen something in his chest. Peter’s death has been even more cathartic. It has given Derek the most beautiful gift — instead of having nightmares of his family dying, he has dreams of them. He wakes up with his mother’s face inside of his eyelids. He gets the grating monotony of simple things, like washing dishes next to Cora. He dreams of text messages and book reviews from Laura. He imagines new antics he’d get into with his uncle Peter, youthful, alive, and sane.

He’s reinforced the door to the loft and changed the locks. He bought a memory foam pillow. His comforter is thick and downy, the weight of it hugging him while he sleeps. He knows it’s a sign of depression, but Derek sleeps a lot now. He has years to catch up on, and he’s made it a priority. Someday, in a few months or a few years, he’ll get a job. He’s looked up how to go about getting his GED, but he’s not ready for that yet. For now, he just dreams.  

And if the son of a certain law enforcement official makes occasional appearances, well, he’s not in control of his dreams. That’s not his fault.

“Stiles?” he asks, his voice groggy and confused. Nothing like waking up to a phone call from the person you’re dreaming about.

“Derek,” he says again, and it sounds like he’s pleading. “Derek, I need your help,” he repeats. The soft edges of Derek’s dream disappear, and the pale, spotted boy laying next to him in his bed becomes dream-mist. Real Stiles elbows him out, panting into the phone. He’s desperate, and not the kind of desperate Derek wants to deal with at three am.

“What’s going on?” Derek asks, putting his phone on speaker and pulling clothes out of the under bed storage bins he bought. Jeans. Long sleeve henley. Socks. He grabs his wallet off his side table and laces up his boots as he listens to Stiles explain where he is. Derek slides his arms into the sleeves of his leather jacket, car keys safe in the right hand pocket, and goes to find Stiles.

-

Stiles is in the woods. It’s the preserve, out by Derek’s old house, which the county has demolished. Derek was heartbroken when he’d first seen the cleared land, but nature has started taking it back. There are green things sprouting from the dirt that Derek has to struggle to see in the soft moonlight. This time, being in his old woods doesn’t send a spike of pain through his gut. It feels instead like something has settled.

What hasn’t settled is Stiles’ breathing.

“I killed him,” Stiles whispers, and Derek doesn’t have to ask who. There’s a body of a man thirty feet from where Stiles is standing. The hunting knife that delivered the fatal wound is beside the man’s body, and Stiles is saturated with blood. His hands are coated, clothes thick with stains. He has smears on his face that have been wiped off on the sleeve of his hoodie.

“What happened?” Derek asks. He doesn’t want to jump to conclusions. He has no idea what to think with Stiles standing there, smelling hurt and scared. “Are you okay?”

“He…” Stiles starts choking on his words. He stammers his single word a few times, tries to catch his breath. Derek chances a glance back at the body, and when he looks back, there are tears sliding down from Stiles’ bright eyes. “He tried…”

Stiles can’t spit it out. He’s holding his hands out in front of him, staring at them like he probably has for the fifteen minutes straight since he called Derek. He looks like he’s about to collapse in on himself.

“He attacked you?” Derek asks, his voice low.

“He tried to…” Stiles stammers. He clears his throat, averts his eyes from Derek. “I went to the Jungle tonight,” he starts. “This guy, he said his name was Sam. He bought me a drink. We danced a little. And then we left together…”

“Stiles,” Derek says, interrupting. “You don’t have to say it.” Derek knows the power of words. How much harder things get, how much more real they become, when they’re spoken aloud.

“I can’t tell my dad,” he says, trying in vain to wipe his hands off on the pockets of his hoodie. Derek sees the blood covered corner of Stiles’ phone sticking out of his pants pocket. He has no idea how to clean that. “I can’t tell Scott.”

“Scott would understand,” Derek says, knowing that it’s true. Scott would not only understand, but he would help hide the body.

“Scott would understand,” Stiles starts, “but he’d know. He’d know forever that I killed someone and I can’t—” He stops again. Derek can see he’s only just holding onto his composure, whatever’s left of it. “Scott can’t know.”

“Scott would forgive you.”

“I don’t want him to have to,” Stiles says.

So Derek is the person that Stiles Stilinski calls in the middle of the night to help hide the body. Derek hadn’t exactly anticipated this course of events, but he also wasn’t exactly surprised.

“Do you know what to do? What do we do?” Stiles asks, a little frantic. Derek concentrates, lets the woods fill his senses. He can hear out to the freeway, and to the western edges of the property. He can hear the heartbeats of animals, flapping of wings. They have owls out here, and he can hear one hunting toward the interstate. Nothing human though. Just him and Stiles. And...Sam.

Derek unfortunately does know what to do.

“I am never doing this for you again,” he says, angry at Stiles for being the one person on the planet left he’d do this for, probably. Scott would never turn up with a body. Isaac could clean up his own mess, for all Derek cared.

The body is not nearly as bloody as Stiles is. Sam’s corpse is splayed on his back, wound in his chest. The gut hook on the hunting knife did a number on this guy. Derek’s not even sure why Stiles would have one - he doesn't hunt, but it glints in the moonlight, blood sticky on the blade.

Fuck this. Fuck everything. Fuck Stiles fucking Stilinski right now. The way Derek knows that this is real and happening now is because it’s so horrible. Once he might have confused it with a nightmare, but now he knows his dreams aren’t for things like this. This is just what his waking life continues to be for.

He kneels at the side of the body, nudges a couple fingers up under his jaw. No pulse. His body still has some heat to it, for which Derek is grateful for. This will take a little heat. He looses his fangs, shoots Stiles a look as his vision blurs red for just a second. He takes a deep breath, leans over the body, and bites.

-

“I’m not one hundred percent sure that what you think is going to happen is going to actually happen,” Stiles says. They’re in Derek’s bathroom, the moon now gone from the sky. Their night had been long and terrible. Derek swore after he buried Laura that it would be the last time he dug a shallow grave on his property. He chided himself internally for being so hopeful.

“He’ll turn,” Derek says. He’s seen human corpses change into wolves with a bite. Some fail-safe in the magic of being a werewolf. Five guesses as to which psychotic uncle showed him that trick. The man Stiles killed will be a wolf under a foot of dirt when Derek checks on him tomorrow. Things like that almost make him believe in God. Almost.

He cuts Stiles’ shirt off of his chest. His hoodie has already made its one-way trip into the garbage bag at Derek’s feet. The shirt is next. It’s crusty with so much blood, and Derek refuses to let Stiles pull it off over his head. Blood is dangerous. Stiles just rolls his eyes and holds still.

Derek strips him slowly, tossing the soiled clothes out. It isn’t the way he’d ever imagined he’d be taking Stiles’ clothes off. The way he imagined involved his lips a lot more. Reassuring touches. Enthusiastic consent. Heavily lidded eyes.

Instead he watches as goosebumps rise over Stiles’ exposed skin. His arms are crossed over his chest protectively, and he only rolls his eyes when Derek finds a smudge of red on his boxer briefs. Derek cuts those away too.

“Get in the shower,” Derek says, shoving Stiles toward the stall. The water running, pounding hard and hot. Water pressure is never a problem in Derek’s loft, like it seemed to be in every shitty motel he’d ever been to. He peels his own clothes off, disposes of them too, and grabs a few washcloths from the cabinet before following Stiles in.

Derek doesn’t trust Stiles in this. Stiles had gotten blood all over every crevice of himself. Derek can smell it everywhere. He lets Stiles wash himself the first few times before taking over. He lathers thick suds and scrubs the soft places behind his ears, catching soap in the dip in his collarbone. He scrubs under the hinge of his jaw and the edge of his hairline. He takes each of Stiles’ long-fingered hands in his own, gently removing every spot of brown dried blood from his nail beds and the creases in his knuckles. He wipes a stubborn smudge of it off his elbow. Their bodies almost touch when Derek reaches behind Stiles to shut the water off, but they don’t. The situation is not a sexy one.

Stiles is less self-conscious of his body than Derek would have thought. Still, he lets Stiles dry off in private.

Stiles comes out of the bathroom in a pair of Derek’s sweats and a ratty navy t-shirt that Derek usually sleeps in. His hair is lacking the usual pomade he puts in it, but so is Derek’s. Stiles is still shaking. Derek pushes a cup of coffee across the counter to him.

“I’m just going to assume you’re not going to be able to sleep,” Derek says. Stiles sags against the kitchen counter; the bags under his eyes looking more pronounced than ever. The kids had said the doors in their minds had been closed, but they were all still dealing with the after effects of that.

“I’m exhausted,” Stiles says. He eyes the coffee mug in front of, but doesn’t pick it up. Just holds onto it for warmth. “Would going to sleep make me an even more horrible person?”

“You’re not a horrible person,” Derek says, setting his own mug down to pull Stiles into a hug. Maybe it makes Derek a horrible person to be taking a hug from Stiles because he needs it for himself. But that’s the nice thing about hugs. You can’t take one without giving one back. The way Stiles sags in his arms makes him think that it was the right thing for both of them in that moment.

“I killed someone,” he whispers, sounding tiny. Derek has never heard Stiles sound like this. It’s almost as unsettling as the body in the woods.

“You were protecting yourself,” Derek assures him. He rubs a hand up and down Stiles’ back as his breath continues to shake out of his lungs. Stiles stays quiet. Derek notices the light creeping into the loft. His recent commitment to sleeping had led to his biggest splurge since he got his new car - custom blackout curtains. Now he can sleep any time of the day. His east-facing windows had been nice when sleep was torture, and he took any excuse to be awake. But after Peter died, his gigantic windows became more curse than gift.

Derek lowers the thick shades across the wide panes. When he’s done, he sees that Stiles has crept toward his bed, standing expectantly at the side that Derek usually sleeps on.

“Get in,” Derek says, making a sweeping motion with his hand, as though ushering Stiles in himself. He double checks the locks. Stiles’ phone sits dead on the counter, still crusty with blood. They’ll figure that out later. Derek makes Stiles email his dad, watches as Stiles constructs a lie that Derek will have to memorize. He doesn’t let himself stress out about it. Not yet. Sleep first, then he will deal with his life. Yes, he realizes that’s what depression sounds like.

He reaches over Stiles to plug his phone into the charger on the side table. When he rolls away, Stiles goes with him, hesitantly tucking himself into Derek’s side. Derek knows what's it's like to need to be held. So rarely does he find someone to hold him - to hold onto. He wraps his arms tight around Stiles, and guides his head into the negative space below his chin.

The morning is upon them, but Derek’s still pretending it’s nighttime. He's pretending that the dream he was having of the pale, skinny kid laying next to him in his bed had gone uninterrupted. He lets the warm waves of his dreams wash back over him as he falls back asleep. He lets them pull him away from the shore.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Currently rhapsodizing about Tyler Hoechlin's scruff on my [tumblr](http://hannahisawolf.tumblr.com).
> 
> (...and clearly watching too much Hannibal right now.)


End file.
